International English Style: Clarity, part 2
Time to get back to my notes from The Elements of International English Style. We left off partway through the chapter on Clarity.
Tactic 16: Form words in standard ways. While new words are constantly being formed from existing ones, don’t make a practice of it in writing intended for E2 and E3 readers. Keep a good dictionary at hand to check yourself, and don’t adopt the latest buzzwords, which are often corruptions of others. For example, some think that what an administrator does is administrate. Sorry, but administrators administer. Here’s another one that rang in my ears like nails on a chalkboard: one of the HR staff at a workplace was explaining a facet of our compensation plan by saying it was intended "to incent" us to do something or other. (She apparently thought that incent was the root of the word incentive.)
Tactic 17: Use standard spellings. That means stay away from those constructions so beloved by advertisers and marketers: lite, nite, creme, and so on. (I’ve often wondered at the attraction of some business owners to spellings like olde and shoppe. Then there are the tanning booth operators in my town who seem to think that tan looks better as tann.)
Also, you should try to find out if your audience prefers British or American English, and adjust your spelling accordingly.
Tactic 18: Avoid converting nouns into verbs. This includes tacking verb endings onto nouns, as in incentivize, or just using the noun, unchanged, as a verb, as in mentor or source.
Tactic 19: Be aware of the several Englishes. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and idiom vary—sometimes slightly and sometimes greatly—depending on which English-speaking country you visit. In the US, company is treated as a singular, but it’s plural in the UK. Ask an American and a Briton what presently means, and you’ll get two different answers. One that makes me chuckle every time I hear it on a British television program is pavement. In the US, we drive on pavement, in the UK, pedestrians walk on it.
Tactic 20: Be careful with money and dates. (I’d add "and numbers in general.) Dates can be particularly problematic, if in XX/XX/XXX form. In the US, we put the month first, but elswhere it’s the day. Thus 5/7/2006 could mean May 7 or June July 5.
The separator for thousands and decimals is different in other parts of the world as well. In the US, we’d write one million as 1,000,000; elsewhere it might be 1.000.000. And an American billion is not necessarily equal to a British billion.
Roy Jacobsen
Thanks and 100 points to Scott Meyer for pointing out a silly little error near the end of this entry.
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